Harry

“In all disciplines, there is a trend away from regarding science as the earthly embodiment of some Platonic universal; instead it is being treated more and more as a human activity like any other, or as a sub-culture routinely interacting with other areas of study.”
― Barry Barnes, Scientific knowledge and sociological theory

“If you can spray them, then they are real”
― Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science

“Behind wire partitions, each with a number fixed on it, were enthroned the almost immobile women, priestesses of the venal Ceres, market women of all fruit of field and tree, of all edible fowl, fish and mammals, procuresses, inviolable wool-clad colossi who communicated among themselves from one booth to another, whether with a flash of their great buttons, with a slap on the apron or with a bosom-swelling sigh. Did it not seethe, bubble and swell under their skirts, was this not the truly fertile ground? Did not a market god himself cast his wares into their laps: berries, shellfish, mushrooms, lumps of meat and cabbage, cohabiting unseen with those who gave themselves to him, while they, leaning against barrels or with their scales slack-chained between their knees, surveyed languidly and mutely the lines of housewives laden with bags and shopping nets who tried with difficulty to steer their broods before them through the slick, stinking passages.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900